What is the best imaging software, not like Norton Ghost, that does a sector by sector image copy that does not affect the original drive? I have a failed RAID 5 drive and need to do a manual data copy on that drive (it has a couple of bad sectors, but no hardware failure to my knowledge) and want to make a mirror of it to a healthy drive and then try rebuilding my RAID again. Thanks.

Acronis True Image ??

Another vote for Acronis it's also Vista compatible if you decide to upgrade.

JMasterJ Why is it necessary to use sector by sector image? Maybe I don't know what I am doing but wouldn't that restrict you to the same hard drive model? Acronis true image, as well as Ghost will create a compressed image that can restore to any hard drive of the the same interface. Wouldn't that be more versatile? Below is a link to the second latest Acronis version. I does support Vista. That version also includes disk director. This is a good deal. Also has a rebate. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...

See G4U. By the way Ghost can do bit by bit also. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Acronis/Ghost will not do... my drive has bad sectors, most probably on the hardware level, and these programs will not read the whole drive, and may not even read one byte. I need something like Linux's dd_rescue/ddrescue that images byte by byte so it can simply skip over the bad parts and still record every good sector. And remember this is a RAID 5 drive, not a simply XP partition.

XXClone, a freeware utility, would be the tool I used!